Saving time

Never Pay For Cloud Storage Again.

Claiming your one terabyte of free space in the cloud.

By Brad Beckstrom.

It’s out there. The land rush is on. Free space. I’m not talking about a few free gigabytes of space, I’m talking free terabytes (1000 Gigabytes). If you’re like most people you have a lot of photos. They are probably out of sight, scattered around in all kinds of places, shoeboxes, disintegrating photo albums, old laptops, photo apps, and smartphones. Especially smartphones. As cameras in smartphones get better (Over 800 Apple engineers worked on the latest iPhone camera) we are taking more and more photos. We take photos of family, friends, pets, projects at work, that dent in our fender, photos of our stuff (a home inventory with photos can come in handy with the insurance company after that next natural or household disaster).

Wouldn’t it be great if we could store all our photos in one place and have them automatically tagged and categorized by date, topic, location, and then easily decide which ones to share with family and friends and which ones to keep private?

I recently got a crash course on photo storage options as I’m working on a project to publish 10,000 images over five years. I needed space for personal photos, work photos, and photographs for the project. If you count photography as a hobby and shoot high-resolution and raw images, up til recently online storage wasn’t a great option. Less than 100 full size image files from a modern digital SLR can take up more space than 65,000 pages of word documents. (about a gigabyte) High res scanned images can be even larger.

Don’t pay for cloud storage. [Read more…] about Never Pay For Cloud Storage Again.

This Once a Month Habit Will Change Your Life.

12/15 by The Frug Leave a Comment

The 10 best tools for finding truly great books.

By Brad Beckstrom

Recently Tim Ferriss (Writer and 4 Hour Workweek guru) was interviewing Kevin Kelly Founding Editor, Senior Maverick of Wired Magazine and an expert on all kinds of cool stuff. Kelly has a crazy two letter domain name kk.org where he shares everything from his extensive list of documentary film recommendations, books, photography and all kinds of cool tools he’s come across. The interview was so fascinating that Tim Ferriss extended it to a second podcast and eventually a third. I highly recommend having a listen.

In the interview Kevin Kelly said one thing that really stuck with me. “ read one book (any book) a month and it will change your life”. I’ve always enjoyed reading, but over the years but I’d gotten more reliant on magazines, blog feeds, apps (like feedly and flipboard) and podcasts. Taking the time to find and read really good books had gotten pushed aside. I was doing quite a bit of reading but the problem with books is that it takes some time to find good ones. I’d often start a book and then not finish it. I might even have two or three books I’ve started on my Kindle app at one time, but after the first few chapters they just sort of trail off.

A lot of the books I’ve read, especially nonfiction, business, and finance books start out like gangbusters then end up trailing off and repeat themselves for the second half of the book. The Kindle app lets you download a sample to your device, but I found the samples are rarely enough to really get a good feel for the quality of the book as they wrap up pretty quickly.

Here’s a quick tip, if a book doesn’t hold your attention at least to the middle chapters dump it. You wouldn’t go around telling people you’re in the middle of a bad book. If you’re going to commit the time to finishing a book a month it should really be one that you enjoy, that you can’t wait to get back to. There are a lot of bad books out there but there are still many many good ones you just need some cool tools to find them. [Read more…] about This Once a Month Habit Will Change Your Life.

Creating a list of musts, because you’ll need it someday.

12/15 by The Frug Leave a Comment

By Brad Beckstrom

Must. That’s a funny word, but it’s a word that came to me along with some serious thoughts. Not so much as a verb, you must do this, or you must do that, more like a noun. As in something that should not be overlooked or missed. More like, going deep on the important things is a must. Don’t overlook the musts.

About a year ago, I was pondering what old age would be like. I was struggling with what it might be, what risks or new discoveries may be in store. Would I be healthy or sick? Would I be rich or poor, and in what, friends, time, money, freedom? Outside of work, what was I doing to impact this. Did I even know what “this” was?

Instead of making another to do list or a list of goals, I decided to write down some things that I felt needed to be musts in my life moving forward. I decided that a must is something that needs to be considered before anything that’s not on the list. A must is something that will influence all decisions. The first few were pretty straightforward: family, friends, health. They are easy to write down, but when you consider the commitment to make these three words musts, that would be a pretty complete list in itself. It was too broad.

For example, when I put something like health on the list that means it’s a must, something that’s in my life every day, not just a “to do” that I may not get to. Family and friends seem pretty obvious, but how many of us let work commitments, travel or commuting get in front of these? I’ve done this in the past. After our first son was born, SuperK would turn up the volume whenever the Harry Chapin song Cat’s in the Cradle came on. A reminder that you could miss much of your child’s years at home if you blink. So if family and friends are at the top of your list of musts, understand the size of that commitment.

If your musts are too broad, big categories like family, friends and health may get replaced with other broad categories like work, sleep, decompress, and spend money. So, it’s best to break those musts down into actions that can can become good habits.

So, for example, under health my musts include: [Read more…] about Creating a list of musts, because you’ll need it someday.

Is an Amazon Prime Membership worth it ?

11/15 by The Frug Leave a Comment

I recently visited a friend and he mentioned that he had Amazon Prime but hadn’t used it much. I’m not a big fan of subscription services, people often sign up then forget them, or don’t use them enough to see any value. I see all kinds of examples of this, fancy gold cards, Netflix, gym memberships, Costco, BJ’s, Sam’s, all kinds of web based music services, shopping clubs, cloud storage, home security, the list goes on. Don’t get me started on cable company add-ons, or any software that “requires” paid updates or monthly fees!

Yet, over the years, I’ve either considered or used every every type of service I’ve listed here. Every year I recommend making a hit list that includes every service or membership that charges a monthly or annual fee. Convert them all to annual totals so you can see how much you’re spending a year on the services, then sort them by the total. Take a close look at each service and how much you’ve really used it over the past year. Start a spreadsheet in Google Docs and each time you come across a monthly or annual fee drop it in there. There’ll be a few you forgot about. Example: Spotify $9.99 Month x12 = $119.88 yr.……

This is about the time of year that we get charged our $99 Amazon Prime renewal fee. With Amazon, it’s not only the annual fee I want to take a look at but also the money our family spends with them. Once you sign up for Amazon Prime, you can get hooked on some of the benefits like free two-day shipping on everything from paper products to textbooks to dog food. Amazon is also great for hard-to-find items like instant unsweetened steel cut oatmeal or other items you may want to purchase elsewhere but would have to pay shipping on. [Read more…] about Is an Amazon Prime Membership worth it ?

How to enter the airline matrix and pounce on invisible fares and discount codes.

11/15 by The Frug Leave a Comment

By Brad Beckstrom

I recently wrote about creating a frequent flyer points machine, using everyday expenses, including healthcare and utilities, to rack up 2X, 3X, 4X frequent-flier points. As a follow-up, I wanted to provide an update on the latest tools I’ve found for spending those points.

Once you’ve figured out how to earn points twice as fast, the real benefit kicks in by spending fewer points, making them go twice as far. Anyone can do this by finding the cheapest days to travel combined with fare deals from your local airport. If you can find the lowest fare, then you can spend your points more efficiently and get the specific flight you want by using your points through your credit card providers travel service. (I use Chase Sapphire Ultimate Rewards for an added 20% points bonus on booking.)

I found the key to doing this is having the exact flight you want to book at hand when you call to apply points to the total price. You don’t want to depend on the agent to find you the best fare, and you certainly don’t want deal with airlines directly which often charge you for the privilege to book. Airlines also like to drastically limit the frequent-flier seats available, unless of course you’re willing to cough up more money or double points.

So how to do it? [Read more…] about How to enter the airline matrix and pounce on invisible fares and discount codes.

How to separate wants from needs.

10/15 by The Frug Leave a Comment

Putting your wants on a wait list so you can end up with something much better. Time.

By Brad Beckstrom

Have you ever purchased something then regretted it later? I think we all have at some point. I look at all the stuff I’ve been getting rid of over the last few years and there’s some regret there. The regret may be less about what I spent on an item and more about the fact that I purchased something and didn’t use it much. Maybe there is some regret over the time I spent researching, purchasing, storing, and now getting rid of the stuff I didn’t use. Regret that the time involved in all that could’ve been spent much better elsewhere. If you have a family, you can often multiply this frustration times each family member. You could be spending time having fun together, versus managing stuff in closets, plastic storage bins, basements, and garages.

The Wait List

So, if you want to avoid wasting this time in the future, maybe there’s a new way to go about this. This stuff problem, this impulse purchase problem. Have you ever walked into a restaurant and been told there’s over an hour wait. Many of us, instead, use that time to find somewhere else to eat and we often stumble upon something better. That wait list made us think about how we wanted to spend the next hour.

I hear about kids getting wait listed for universities. The university is saying we’re interested in you, but not as much as we’re interested in some of these folks we’ve extended offers to. Those are the people we really want. If those don’t work out, we will get back to you. You’ve been wait listed.

While working, if there’s a lot on your plate, you keep a few to do lists going, prioritize some things each morning and let the less important items fall to the bottom, often fall off the list completely. [Read more…] about How to separate wants from needs.